Monday, May 28, 2012

Cleaning Out My Closet

Last week at work, K (a first-grader) and R (a second-grader) were playing a game of Hangman on the whiteboard. It was K's word, and all R had uncovered was R __ __. "Olivia," R asked, "what's a kind of plant that has three letters and starts with an R? And it's not 'rose.' I already asked."

As a result of my brother's basement wine business, we have a mound of grape skins slowly turning to compost in the corner of our yard. The other day my mom noticed a pair of rats patrolling the area and she immediately called my brother to come take care of "the rodent problem." Because there are also rabbits and squirrels running around the yard, Michael didn't want to set out poison. He set a live trap on top of the grape mound and instructed us to check it periodically and to call him if it caught anything. The first captive? A baby squirrel. My mother and I, armed with big sticks and laughably inadequate knowledge of how to open a live trap, set out to free the bushy-tailed prisoner. It was like we'd caught a lion, the way we determined our distance from the trap based on how far our sticks would extend toward it. After calling my brother once, getting his voicemail, fidgeting with some random levers on the cage that did nothing, getting hissed at by the squirrel (by the way, squirrels hiss), and finally connecting with my brother, we managed to free the distraught animal in no less than 27 minutes. In case you missed that, that would be two grown women, a metal cage the size of my abdomen, and a baby effing squirrel. And it didn't so much as look at us in appreciation as it sprinted clear of the cage. See if next time we don't shoot it with a pellet gun (which is, by the way, what my brother did to the rat he caught the next day).

My mother and I have started a list of what we think are the greatest names ever. We posted it on the refrigerator. Anyone with suggestions is welcome to shout them out! So far we have Hope Solo, Soraya Sarhaddhi Nelson, Ofeibia Quist-Arcton, Ruby de Luna, and Dikembe Mutombo. In true nerd fashion, three of the five are NPR reporters. (The other two are sports stars, so does that even it out?)

I think that's all I've got for today. Lucky you.

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Breaking Into My Own House

I almost died the other day, atop the world's most cumbersome ladder. How, you might ask? Let's journey together back in time to Monday morning...

I go for a run every morning around the time that my dad leaves for work and my mom leaves for the gym. We've come to an agreement that they will leave the back door unlocked for me since I don't like to run with a key. (I'm sure my mother would disapprove of the fact that this is now public knowledge, so if you could not tell her that would be great.) However, when I returned Monday after a particularly exhausting hour of exercise, the door handle wouldn't budge. I'd been locked out.

In recounting this story to my dad Monday night, my mother was quick to point out that I would not have been locked out had I returned our spare key to its hiding place after, I reminded her, I had to retrieve it when she'd locked me out the previous evening. Considering I use the spare key maybe once a month, I hadn't anticipated needing it twice in less than twelve hours. But it appeared as though I did need it, and as I twisted furiously at the doorknob, hoping that my hands were just sweaty and weak, the spare key was resting comfortable on the kitchen counter, cackling at me.

No problem, I thought. I'll just go next door. Our neighbors have had a key to our house for years, so I knocked on the door and asked for it. Unfortunately, I realized as I climbed back up our steps with the key, we had the locks changed a few months ago and never gave our neighbors the new key. It was 8:30. My mom was due back at 10:30. I would have to wait outside for two hours. Well, shit.

I sat down on the back steps and did some analysis of the entrances into my house. The front door was out of the question, as were the French doors in the kitchen. The basement had a different lock and I didn't know of a spare key that would get me in there. The upstairs windows weren't locked but they were virtually impossible to open from the outside. Even if I could shimmy open the guest room window, I would first be required to climb the tree by the front door, crawl onto the roof, and do a flying leap over to the window where even best case scenario I would be dangling from the sill by my fingertips.

I was on the verge of despair when I remembered that because the previous night had been hot, and because and heat gets trapped in my second-story bedroom, I'd left the window open. Hallelujah! I thought, and made a beeline for the shed where the ladder was leaning against the scrap wood pile. I managed to tilt it sideways and slide it clear of the shed clutter, but when I bent down to carry it to my window I discovered that this was no ordinary ladder. No, this thing was a beast. Its rungs felt like they were filled with concrete. Somehow, though, I hoisted it onto my shoulders and staggered toward the house like a drunk cartoon character, half expecting to smash it straight into a tree or through a window.

A note about the area beneath my window: A fair amount of the soil is planted, and what space isn't covered with plants contains garden art or the fountain my mom and I built for my dad for Fathers Day years ago. Also, and don't ask me why, there are random piles of fist-sized rocks that serve no apparent purpose beyond just being frustrating. I was forced to navigate this delightful little garden with the world's heaviest ladder extended to full height, with soft soil under my feet and virtually zero level patches on which to place it.

I have a planter box outside my window, and it quickly became evident that I would have to lean the ladder against it rather than to the left of it. The problems with this were the following: 1) The planter box is starting to rot on the bottom and I didn't know how much weight it could support; 2) The ladder would only reach my window if I placed it between the fountain and the house (it would be too short if I moved it to the other side of the fountain), but this meant that the angle was closer to vertical than I felt comfortable climbing. I did it anyway, pulled myself halfway up the rungs, was overcome by images of falling to my death on the concrete steps, and climbed back down. I shifted the ladder a few inches farther out and tried again. Again I made it halfway up and again I scurried back down. Mind you, I was not climbing this ladder like a normal person. Because of the steep angle I was afraid that holding my body far enough away from the rungs that I could pull my knees up in front of me would create too much counterweight and pull the ladder over backwards. I therefore had to angle my body so that my left hip was scraping against the metal as I climbed up sideways, my legs crossing over each other to get to the next rung. Four failed attempts and about thirteen images of my own bloody death later, I finally managed to lean the ladder against the side of the house rather than against the planter box, thereby giving me an appropriate angle.

I reached the top, slid the window open further, and somehow magically (thank you, adrenaline!) shifted my weight onto the windowsill. I was about a third of the way into my room, my legs bruised and muddy and bleeding, when I looked toward my bed and saw my cat with her back arched, hair standing on end, hissing. "Taff, it's me!" I cried desperately, vowing, if I ever made it out of this alive, to reward her for her protective instincts with a tuna treat. But my voice did not have the soothing effect I had hoped, and Taffy lowered herself into pounce position. I clambered into my room and collapsed onto the carpet. Taff probably figured that even if I were a burglar there was nothing she could do about it now, and at least it meant there was someone in the house who might feed her. She stood up, walked over to me, and asked, I can only assume, why I hadn't used the back door like a normal person.

"And to think," my mom said when I had finished telling the story to my dad, "this could have all been avoided if you'd just put the key back." Thanks, Mother. I could have died.

Monday, May 7, 2012

Nick Hornby Explains My Life

"One thing I know about being a [soccer] fan is this: it is not a vicarious pleasure, despite all appearances to the contrary, and those who say that they would rather do than watch are missing the point. Football is a context where watching becomes doing--not in the aerobic sense, because watching a game, smoking your head off while doing so, drinking after it has finished and eating chips on the way home is unlikely to do you a whole lot of Jane Fonda good, in the way that chuffing up and down a pitch is supposed to. But when there is some kind of triumph, the pleasure does not radiate from the players outwards until it reaches the likes of us at the back of the terraces in a pale and diminished form; our fun is not a watery version of the team's fun, even though they are the ones that get to score the goals and climb the steps at Wembley to meet Princess Diana. They joy we feel on occasions like this is not a celebration of others' good fortune, but a celebration of our own; and when there is a disastrous defeat the sorrow that engulfs us is, in effect, self-pity, and anyone who wishes to understand how football is consumed must realize this above all things. The players are merely our representatives, chosen by the manager rather than elected by us, but our representatives nonetheless, and sometimes if you look hard you can see the little poles that join them together, and the handles at the side that enable us to move them. I am a part of the club, just as the club is a part of me..." -Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby

And there you have it. My life explained by a person who has never met me yet seems to know more about me than I do.

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

The Soundtrack to My Drives

My mom's van, being a pre-2000 purchase, has a cassette deck instead of a CD player. Because of this we have a tape adapter that plugs into an iPod. This, you see, is more feasible and much cheaper than traveling back in time to the summer two years ago when we gave away the majority of our stash of cassettes, including the only one that ever officially belonged to me: Wee Sing Children, featuring the toe-tapping tunes of "John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt" and "One Elephant Went Out to Play."

Now, I would be remiss to claim that this tape adapter--how should I say--works. Technically speaking, it does work--by which I mean that when you insert the tape into the player, sound does come out. It just so happens that this "sound" is mostly a cacophonous grinding that you only hear when you trap a fly in a cup against the window, amplified by nine billion. Music does emerge from the speakers, but you have to first crank the volume on both your iPod and the car stereo to the absolute max. And, I should add, when you do this you also have that whiny, vaguely staticky buzz that comes from turning the volume too high.

If you were to pull up next to me at a stoplight when my windows are down, you would witness the perpetual grimace that I seem to adopt whenever I'm trying desperately to hear Ingrid Michaelson's voice over the din of the mechanical insects flapping themselves into cardiac arrest inside my speakers.

On the bright side, when I use the CD player in my dad's car, the purity of the unadulterated music is such that I feel like I could fly. And not against the glass.